


Close

by recrudescence



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Kink Meme, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 14:48:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever thinks of Reid as being particularly well-adapted, but Aaron believes in giving due credit. He isn't sure he would be able to serve as a functioning member of society if he were incapable of forgetting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Close

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a leftover prompt from the [Criminal Minds Kink Meme](http://ansera.livejournal.com/21451.html#cutid1): _Hotch/Reid - Hotch likes to wear silky women's panties._ I managed to take that and angst it up like nobody's business. Whoops.

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[criminal minds fic](http://recrudescence.livejournal.com/tag/criminal+minds+fic), [hotch/reid](http://recrudescence.livejournal.com/tag/hotch/reid)  
  
---|---  
  
 

They fought on the same side. Even when he was working, even when he was too consumed by cases to set eyes on his wife for weeks at a time, the two of them were always able to make time for each other.

Somewhere, at some point over the years, the scales started tipping too far in one direction and Aaron didn't realize it was out of his hands until they weren't strong enough to pull everything back into equilibrium. There have been pieces missing from his life for so long, since the separation, since home became a place containing no one but himself, and now that Haley isn't a phone call or a weekend visit away it's an even more slippery slope into a new kind of unfamiliarity. The word chaos seems drolly dramatic.

Reacquiring those pieces is no less gradual and far more arduous. No room for obliviousness as he's consciously keeping a piece of Haley close, when he can—trinkets and keepsakes and old photo albums and letters and so many fragments from the past. In his line of work, there's no room for allowing any warning signs to slip by. The prospect of failure keeps him on his toes even when stepping out of bed requires an extra hour of lying in it and staring down the opposite wall. Strauss's eyes glinting behind her glasses, voice clipped and businesslike and not quite managing to hold empathy, reeling off reasons to believe Aaron Hotcher is going off the rails and unfit for work or raising a child. Certain scenarios spring to mind with persistent facility.

Reid's spindly fingers on his head, urging it downward, and Aaron doesn't need any further impetus not to meet his eyes. It's a mercy that Reid is unexpectedly taciturn when there are undoubtedly a million things he could say about ritualization and grieving and symptoms of horrible mental declines. Pants unfastened, hanging free, and there's the sensation of silk on skin.

There are so many terrible realities forever stored in the vastness of Reid's mind that this is just another drop in the bucket. No one ever thinks of Reid as being particularly well-adapted, but Aaron believes in giving due credit. He isn't sure he would be able to serve as a functioning member of society if he were incapable of forgetting.

Always with the lights dimmed almost to nothingness. He remembers Reid owning up to a childish fear of the dark once, during a conversation that now seems so lighthearted it's almost fiction, but Reid never mentions it, never seems ill at ease. Aaron has surmised that either he's acting or he's telling himself to be the strong one because Aaron so clearly isn't. At one point, he would have abhorred appearing vulnerable to anyone from work. Now, Reid and his mind and his accustomedness to being the scapegoat make for as viable an option as any.

His hands are long and light, but there's strength there—not a visible kind, but slow and sure and subtle, running the length of Aaron's back and catching on the waistband and Aaron keeps his face hidden by shadows and pillows so he can remind himself to look Spencer in the eye when they cross paths at work in the morning. Profiling is a tricky business, and an engrossing one. He knows that more than anyone by now, but there are far more fulfilling ways to occupy his time than by succumbing to maudlin ponderings. Haley's sister takes care of Jack most days and no one breathed a word of dissent when he said he was fine with that; he loves the boy more than anything in the world, but it would be madness keeping him under his own roof now and everyone seems acutely aware of that fact. Possibly, he's meant to be grateful.

Reid's mouth is full and soft and warm, searing into his shoulder blades and his hipbones and the backs of his knees. Palming him through thin-cool cloth, close-fitting as another set of skin, and he groans into the darkness until Reid muffles him with his own lips again and again and again, like he's trying to give him a message without uttering a single word.

He inclines his head once, just enough to glance at him, and his voice takes on the tone it usually does when he's launching into a recitation. Aaron can tell he's been struggling to stave off this moment for a long time, but he acknowledges nothing. Reid's eyes dart and his hands flex absently in the sheets as he declares, "Contextualized within tragic circumstances, these personal items are transformed into fetishes of loss and remembrance, deeply erotic and deeply elegiac."

"Reid, don't."

And he doesn't. Wetting his lips, first with the tip of his own tongue, then by pressing them fleetingly against Aaron's. Running those fingers through his hair, down his shoulders, squeezing now and then as if testing, trying to determine how substantial he is. Fair enough. "Aaron." Reid's voice wraps around his name with an understated but determined firmness. "Being susceptible to typical human emotions isn't something worth agonizing over unless you're doing it in excess. So many things you do are so much more ordinary than you think. Slavoj Žižek called it 'the fetishizing power of logos.'"

Aaron's only answer to that is to draw down the blankets, ease himself between them, and draw them back up again. Plain and warm and store-bought on his own, to go with a smaller bed more suited to his smaller living arrangement. "It would be best if you left now." Closing his eyes, not needing to feign fatigue. He can feel Reid hesitating at his side, knowing he's unsure whether or not he should lean in and kiss him before departing. He doesn't, and that makes things a little easier.

Hushed and furtive, slowly undressing him bit by bit; Reid is fresh and sharp on his tongue, breath catching and hips hitching, and if there were enough light to see Aaron knows there would be two distinct spots of pinkness in his cheeks. Responsive in the way of someone who isn't used to having this kind of stimulus, anxious for anything, acceptance and reassurance and doing the right thing. This time, the right thing happens to involve sprawling naked over his former supervisor, each breath mingling with the rustle of sheets and the friction of skin against skin; tongue press-running low on his stomach as he's running fingers under the waistband of those underpants, teasing and skimming and never quite touching actual skin. Never quite removing, never quiet dipping far enough underneath. Reid's hands ring his wrists and Aaron arches up against him, hard and taut-drawn and smearing in hot spurts over the inside of his underwear as he's swallowing down an inchoate sound.

It always used to drive Haley crazy when he did that—feeling how wet she was through the fabric, grazing the edge of his thumbnail straight up the center, making her wriggle and moan, legs parting almost unconsciously under him. Stomach drawing in and every breath hitching hard in her throat, tongue on her through the cloth until it soaked through and she was struggling to squirm and kick her way out of that last article of clothing, finally getting herself free and letting them both have what they wanted.

_Tasting_ her, bare and wethotsweet in his mouth. Slim hands closing in his hair—Reid's hands in his hair, nails too short-trimmed to drag across his scalp the way hers once had—on his shoulders, neck, softness of thighs pressing against his cheeks and ears, the way she would tremble and laugh breathlessly if he needed to shave and the scrub of facial hair on tender skin left her shivering. Everything part of a game without an instruction manual and plenty of room for improvisation; just another way for him to tease, and she was always so completely, beautifully lost in it. Each and every time, right up until she was swatting at him for being a jerk and then immediately pulling him in, wrapping around him with every limb, tongue licking right into his mouth and the taste of herself, and she would _gasp_ as if there wasn't enough air in the world for her to catch her breath again.

When Reid sucks him through the panties—also purchased on his own, sizing through trial and error and slowly stifled shame that perhaps was never as present as he anticipated—and then kisses him on the mouth, Aaron can sometimes feel a little less cold. Someone as fragile-looking as Reid gives of a surprising amount of heat, and he soaks up as much of it as he can, anything Reid is willing to offer.

"Do you..." Reid begins once, hands nimble and dexterous as Haley's, undoing fabric and dropping into a kneel in order to skim the trousers off Aaron's feet.

"Of course I miss her." Logically, this isn't the most psychologically sound coping method, but it's the best one he has for now.

Reid bites his lips and sighs faintly. "That wasn't what I was going to say."


End file.
